Blum is a fast-growing cryptocurrency trading platform that blends gaming, crypto onboarding, and finance. With nearly 100 million users and 10 million daily active users across 90+ countries, Blum turned to DigitalOcean to help scale their infrastructure, maintain performance under high loads, and accelerate innovation without compromising user experience.

Bringing Web2 users into Web3

Crypto trading tools are often complicated and intimidating, which has been a roadblock preventing mainstream users from exploring Web3. Blum tackles this problem head-on by creating a Telegram mini app with an intuitive interface and fun game mechanics that make crypto trading feel accessible rather than overwhelming.

“Our goal is to make crypto feel as simple as a neobank. Even my parents can use it. That’s the level of onboarding we aim for,” says Vladimir.

Telegram’s explosive growth as a platform for mini apps played to Blum’s strengths. The team saw an opportunity to meet users where they already were, on mobile, and convert Web2 habits into Web3 engagement. By the summer of 2024, Blum had reached 30 million users. By year-end, that number had tripled.

Infrastructure that adapts as you scale

As Blum grew, their infrastructure required rapid and reliable scaling. The team needed to serve millions of users performing real-time transactions across blockchains, without the overhead of complex infrastructure management. To meet that demand, Blum chose DigitalOcean. “DigitalOcean helped us serve users at a global scale. We rely heavily on Droplets for our backend services—different sizes for different needs. We’ve also adopted Managed PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Kubernetes to simplify scaling,” notes Vladimir.

DigitalOcean’s fast provisioning and stability allowed Blum to scale vertically and horizontally to handle sudden traffic spikes. “When you’re under pressure, you don’t always have time to optimize code. That’s where good provisioning really matters,” explains Vladimir.

Support and simplicity make the difference

While cost is always a consideration, Blum found even greater value in the time and effort saved by their DevOps team. With DigitalOcean, the team experienced faster provisioning, reduced operational overhead, and a user interface that made day-to-day management intuitive and efficient. The platform’s balanced approach, combining strong UX, reliable infrastructure, and fair pricing, allowed Blum to focus more on building and less on maintaining, ultimately accelerating their time to value.

Customer support was another differentiator. Whether Blum needed GPU units or help configuring services, they found DigitalOcean’s support team responsive, collaborative, and fast compared to some larger cloud providers. “DigitalOcean is definitely in the top three cloud providers and maybe even the top one when it comes to customer support, provisioning, and infrastructure stability,” Vladimir says.

Scaling products, not complexity

After a breakout year of user growth, Blum is now scaling product offerings like new trading mechanics, more supported chains, and access to decentralized finance for a global audience. Their goal is to simplify their cloud infrastructure even further, avoid vendor sprawl, and keep building with a trusted partner.

“We try to keep our infrastructure as simple as possible, and DigitalOcean helps us do that. The past 12 months proved that DigitalOcean can support high-load projects, and that’s exactly what we needed.” Vladimir says.

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